enhacement: plugins

[gamagan]

When I started playing around with the plugins, I realized how powerful they can be. They were a great addition to owl-bt.

At first, defining a plugin was a little confusing because of catching and because changes to plugin js files are not hot-loaded. Changes made to the plugin files didn't seem to affect existing tree files. Then I realized what's happening. Not that it's a bug; it's just that it could be confusing to a new user. You might want to mention it in the documentation:

1. owl-bt will not remove existing fields in tree files. If a field is there when the tree file is loaded, it will be written when the file is saved. This confused me because I added a field via plugin, but then deleted the plugin code, but the field was still in the file whenever I saved it. I removed the field manually, restarted owl-bt, and then saved the file and the field was gone.
2. For changes in owl-bt.js to take effect, owl-bt needs to be restarted. This, combined with 1, was making me think that the plugin wasn't working. Changes to other files are hot-loaded, so it caught me by surprise.

ENHANCEMENT REQUEST:

A) I'm guessing that if you didn't support hot-loading owl-bt.js was because of technical reasons. If this is possible, however, it would be a really nice to have.

B) There is an opportunity to make plugins also work as validators: make the return value of 'onTreeSave' and 'onTreeLoad' determine whether the file can be saved or loaded. Maybe something like this:

• onTreeSave: If return value is true, file will be saved. If return value if false, file will not be saved, and there will be a generic error shown to the user that the file was not saved. If the return value is a string, then the file is not saved, and the error message shown to the user is the value of the string. This will allow plugins to be used as validator -- you can perform checks on the tree, according to your own logic, and if you find something funky, you'll get a message of what the validation error was. This would be really nice, because you can guarantee that the file saved is 100% valid, according to the user's particular requirements.

[gamagan]

Any progress?

[pruttned]

pls see https://github.com/pruttned/owl-bt/issues/5

[pruttned]

done in 1.3.0

[gamagan]

Thanks, bruh